


play ring around the ambulance

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Dissociation, Drug Abuse, Gen, Hospitalization, Sort Of, drug overdose, heavily bullshitted ghost rules, it's darkISH okay it's not terrible but it's darkISH
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 09:52:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Klaus overdoses for the second time when he’s twenty.  Ben is going to fucking kill him if he lives through this.With Klaus in the hospital after a heroin overdose, Ben waits for his brother to wake up and takes drastic measures.Ben is still an eldritch horror, and sitting by and watching his brother be haunted into madness doesn't sit well with him.





	play ring around the ambulance

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [to my Tumblr!](https://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/post/184119699107/hey-star-your-tags-on-that-umbrella-academy-post)
> 
> In case anyone is curious, we should all be abusing MCR songs much more regularly for UA titles, this one is from House of Wolves.

Klaus overdoses for the second time when he’s twenty.

He overdosed for the first time two days after his brother’s funeral.  That’s another story, but the short version goes like this.  Klaus started crying after he stopped screaming, and Ben didn’t leave.  Then he stopped crying and he started drinking, and Ben didn’t leave.  Before the funeral, he took some pills, and Ben didn’t leave.  After the funeral, he took whatever he could get his hands on, and Ben vanished like the rest of them, his fragile link to Klaus eroded by the high, and then–smash cut to Klaus Hargreeves in an ambulance, in a hospital bed, in the tabloids.  Ben doesn’t know how he forced his way through Klaus’ haze of intoxication enough to be  _seen_ , when Klaus came to, briefly, in the ambulance, but he also knows that Klaus has never managed to get rid of him properly since.

Point is, Klaus is twenty and it’s a Monday and Ben is going to fucking kill him if he lives through this.

“Klaus!  Klaus, get up!” Ben shouts.

“B’nny,” Klaus drawls, so slow, like the words are as thick as tar. He’s not quite all gone yet but Klaus, and by extension Ben, has hung around a lot of junkies lately.  Ben knows what it looks like as the crest of a heroin overdose starts to crash down like a wave, and he’s  _not fucking letting it._   “Shhh.”

“ _Fuck_  you, get up and call an ambulance!”

“D’n wanna.”

It’s been a long time since Ben forgot he was dead, but he grabs thoughtlessly at Klaus, moving to shake him or drag him to his feet or  _something_.  His hands slip right into Klaus’ chest with a shock like static discharge.  It’s not a great feeling for the dead, generally worse for the living, and from the looks of things, enough heroin to drop someone twice Klaus’ size makes it even more unpleasant.

“Go’way,” Klaus says, sliding further down in his seat so that Ben’s hands phase out of him.  “M’tired.”

Ben does not go away.  “Get  _up_.”

“No.”

Ben kicks him in the leg.  

It doesn’t connect, of course, but Ben can’t do much else.  Klaus winces away from the cold shock of Ben’s foot passing through his shin, pulling both feet up clumsily onto the couch, and Ben aims an open-handed slap at Klaus’ head.  It makes Klaus rock sideways to avoid it, toward the phone on the counter five feet away.  Ben sits down on the couch right where Klaus is obviously hoping to lie down, and Klaus shivers away from him.

“Phone,” Ben says flatly.  “Now.” He hesitates.  “I don’t want to watch you die, Klaus.”

It’s a low blow.  Emotional honesty is cheating, in Hargreeves family arguments.  He can see something like confused betrayal cross Klaus’ face, like Ben just went for a crotch shot during a friendly sparring match.

Fucking  _tough_.

“Call an ambulance,” Ben repeats.

Klaus stares at him.  Ben doesn’t flinch.

The ambulance gets there seven minutes later.

Diego’s number is in Klaus’ pocket, because Diego offered and Ben heckled Klaus until he agreed, and it takes hours for Diego to show up.  In the meantime, Ben sits on the foot of Klaus’ bed, hands clasped in front of his mouth, and watches the in-and-out drift of the ghosts around them, as naloxone and heroin compete for ownership of Klaus’ system.  When the nurse comes in and ups the naloxone dose, the ghosts surge to the fore, not quite real enough to speak but more than real enough to cluster around the foot of Klaus’ bed.  As the naloxone degrades and the heroin rises back to the fore, the ghosts fade again as Klaus’ breathing slows.  

Ben is dead.  He can’t feel his heart race or his hands shake with the adrenaline drop—he can’t  _do_  adrenaline anymore.  He’s rare, even unique, in his experience of the dead, because when he died he seems to have just gone cold, rather than being trapped in an endless nightmare of his own death.  He can be furious, he can be afraid, he can be happy, but it’s all muffled in comparison to when he was alive.  Never more muffled than now.  The more sober Klaus is, the more real Ben is, but right now—

Well, right now Klaus is about as far from sober as he can get without being  _dead_ , and Ben, for once, appreciates the clarity.

This needs to not happen again.  Later, when Klaus is awake, maybe Ben will be able to attach frantic worry and the keening, screaming fear of being alone to that sentiment, but right now it’s a fact, plain and simple.  This needs to not happen again.  The drugs are one thing, but this willful, reckless self-endangerment must stop, for both their sakes.

For  _all_  their sakes, really, because real-Ben might be angry with his siblings for letting Klaus slip away, but dead-Ben, cold-Ben, he knows that they care.  They’re just too busy being wrapped up in their own damage to notice that Klaus has been drowning since they were kids.

Ben sits there for an hour, watching the ghosts ebb and flow, and turns the problem over in his mind.  He needs to do something to save Klaus, because his siblings won’t.  It’s not their fault, they just don’t get why Klaus needs saving.  None of them understand what it’s like to be terrified of their own powers.  Hell, if being high had closed away the shadowed parts of Ben’s mind, sealed whatever portal They could touch him through, he can see how he might have ended up in this hospital bed himself.

There’s a thought, Ben muses.  Klaus is on the downswing, and Ben’s cold enough to think about it, at the moment.  Being dead has made him—limited.  He doesn’t feel the  _need_ , the  _craving_ , that radiated from Them when he was alive.  Maybe because Klaus is never sober enough to make him that real, maybe because being dead means that They don’t need blood the same way Ben doesn’t need water.  

But that begs the question of whether They’re  _gone_  or just  _resting_.

For the first time since the disastrous mission that cost Ben his life, he closes his eyes and reaches out, and—

And tentacles burst out of his chest, out of his belly, as painlessly and easily as flexing his fingers.

Ben is startled enough that it cuts through the cold, just for a moment, and the tentacles stay there, rippling like he’s underwater, stirred by currents that he can’t see.  They’re cold and slick to the touch when he lets one wrap around his hand—not slimy, just slick, like steel doused with water.  There’s no blood, this time, no penalty for keeping Them locked away all these years, They’re just  _there_. He can’t even feel the burning strain of keeping things under control.

Of course.  The dead can’t feel pain.

Not that Ben wouldn’t trade anything to be alive again, but also: this is an unforeseen upside of death that he will have to remember to appreciate, after Klaus is conscious and he can appreciate things again.  

For the moment, he’s going to buy them some time.

Ben dismisses the tentacles—They vanish like he’s waved his hand through steam, easy like it never was when he was alive—and resettles himself on the end of Klaus’ bed, legs crossed and elbows propped on his knees.  Then he watches a nurse come in and check the naloxone, and he waits for the ghosts to come back.

Here’s the thing.

Ben was never really…a planner, when he was alive.  He outgrew plans fairly young, because frankly no plan survived contact with Them and eventually Ben learned to roll with the punches.  There was very little in the way of finesse to being more or less the party tank. Ben stood back with Klaus while Diego and Luther and Allison and Five cleared civilians and took down anyone who got in their way, and then Ben killed everyone who was left over.  Very simple.  All he ever had to do was keep his mouth shut and not have a panic attack until after they were done debriefing with their father.

Now he’s here, and he’s not entirely sure what he’s going to  _do_.  Ben has only the vaguest recollection of how Reginald taught them to plan, something to the tune of  _set your goals and consider how to achieve them with the available resources_ , which was less than helpful when they were eleven and isn’t much better now.  

Ben wants Klaus to never nearly kill himself again.  Therefore, Ben wants Klaus to stop taking drugs so much. His goal is to get Klaus to go to rehab and make it stick this time.  

Ben is a ghost and can’t exactly  _do_  anything to make Klaus cooperate, except apparently emotionally blackmail him.  Ben’s sum total of available resources comes to two: he has his voice, and he has ghost tentacles that can’t do anything to Klaus except possibly startle him.  Not likely.  Klaus is jittery in the way of junkies everywhere, but his threshold for ‘startled’ is high, because he spends all his time ignoring ghosts with their intestines dangling out of their abdomen.  So Ben can yell at him.  Excellent. Not helpful, obviously, because if Ben could change Klaus’ mind by yelling, he definitely would have managed it by now.

Klaus must be cycling up again, because frustration wells up in Ben’s chest like water coming to a boil, and a ghost clarifies to Ben’s right.

“Fuck off,” Ben tells the ghost, scowling.  It’s a woman in a bloody blue dress, and she has a steak knife buried in her eye.  She looks to him when he speaks, but not for long—Ben is dead too, and ghosts hold little interest for their own kind as far as he can tell.  Ben hasn’t been haunted since he died, according to Klaus, and it’s nice, admittedly, to have Klaus look at him sometimes these days.  By the time Ben died, Klaus could barely stand to be sober in the same room with him.  

Ben’s not sure how many people he’s killed.  He’s pretty sure Klaus could tell him, and he absolutely does not want to hear that number.

The woman in blue edges toward Klaus, and in the corners of the room, Ben can see other ghosts clarifying.  It’s the only word for it, when they blur back into reality after being driven away by Klaus’ latest high, and they’re coming back gradually, but more strongly than before.  The heroin must be starting to work its way out of Klaus’ system.

Ben feels another emotion click into place, resurrected by Klaus’ gradual return to the world of the living, and it’s the fear.  He’s on a clock.  The second Klaus is well enough to wander out of this hospital, he’s going to go try to deafen himself to the ghosts again.  Klaus will kill himself long and slow with apathy and chemicals, right up until he kills himself  _fast_  with chemicals, and Ben isn’t sure he can shout Klaus into saving his own life twice.

Fuck, what is Ben supposed to  _do_  here?  

For a moment, angry and edging toward frantic, Ben misses Luther so sharply it hurts.  Luther is too much of a linear thinker to be a good strategist, not exactly a leader for the ages, kind of insufferable even at his better moments—but he was Number One. When one of them didn’t want to be responsible for their plans, their crisis, their mission, they could turn to Luther and shove it all into his hands and walk the fuck away.  Luther might not do the  _right_  thing, but he’d do  _something_ , and it wouldn’t be Ben’s fault if it went horribly wrong.  If Ben sits here frozen and indecisive until Klaus walks out to buy some cocaine or some meth or God knows what else, that’s going to be Ben’s fault, and he wishes Number One was here to take over.

The woman in blue is standing at Klaus’ bedside now, near his hand, and she leans over, and opens her mouth.

“Please,” she says, and her voice might be pretty if it wasn’t ravaged like she’s been crying or screaming or both.  “ _Please_.  You have to save her, you have to–”

“Hey,” Ben barks as Klaus stirs, just slightly, under the sheet.  “He doesn’t  _have_  to do anything.”

She ignores him, bending closer, one shaking hand reaching out toward Klaus as if to grab him.  Sometimes newer ghosts are like that, handsy, like they’ve forgotten they can’t touch Klaus and cling to him until he  _listens_  to them, and—

Klaus’s heart rate is starting to pick up.  

Ben needs more  _time_ , more time to find a solution.

The woman in blue is still begging, and the steady beep of Klaus’ heart monitor is marking his slow return to consciousness, and the gathered ghosts are starting to murmur, and it’s been a long time since Ben remembered sensory overload but he needs  _quiet_ , just for a moment, just for long enough to figure out what to  _do_.

“Don’t touch him!” Ben says, and grabs the woman in blue by the shoulder.

It—works.

Ben doesn’t think about it for too long, just slides off the hospital bed and all but throws her backward.  If he thinks about it, he’s definitely going to reach some kind of internal limit on the amount of stress he can take and glitch out of existence.  So he doesn’t think, just uses a grip that Diego taught him when they were kids and sends her flying back.

She looks shocked, startled out of her cycle of begging and screaming and shouting, and Ben is standing between her and Klaus.  

“Don’t touch him,” Ben repeats, flatly.  “He’s sleeping.”

“I just—I just need to talk to him,” she says.  To Ben, now.  Apparently, getting violent is enough to earn Ben a moment of attention.

“Not right now you don’t.”

“I need—I have to–”

Maybe he should be kinder.  Maybe he should be softer, maybe he should understand her desperation, maybe he should see something worth helping here, but—

She reaches out, trying to get past Ben, and all he sees is a threat.

“ _Stop,”_  Ben snarls, and They come to his call, and the woman in blue barely has a moment to look horrified before Ben rips her spectral self into so many tatters of mist.  There’s no screaming.  A tentacle clamps over her mouth and tears her head clean off before she can manage it.

Years of habit forces the shock and alarm, the automatic  _oh God what did I do_ , into the back of Ben’s mind to be dealt with later.  It’s been a long time since he slipped into the mindset of a mission, but no one ever said the Umbrella Academy was poorly trained, and it settles into place without any effort at all.

The woman in blue doesn’t reform.  It’s possible he’s destroyed her completely.  He’ll deal with that later, too.  For now, he steps forward, toward the ghosts huddled around the foot of Klaus’ bed and puts on his best, most merciless tone, and says, “Who’s next?”

Five ghosts are next.  In order, they are an old man with a slashed throat, a girl no more than thirteen whose right side is broken from femur to shoulder, a young man with three bullet holes in his gut and a fourth between his eyes, a woman in her prime dressed in torn clothes and a slashed throat, and an old woman without any injuries at all, save for the IV shunt still leaking blood from her hand.  Each of them try to speak to Ben.  Three of them try to shout past him, at Klaus, who hasn’t quite beaten the sedative drag of the heroin enough to open his eyes.

Ben tears through them like tissue paper, one after another.

Later, he might be appalled at himself for it.  Right now, all he can feel is a dim, grim gratitude that ghosts don’t bleed.

Ben always hated being covered in other people’s blood.

When he’s done, he turns his gaze on the remaining ghosts.  They look back at him with an unusual degree of presence of mind, the kind of  _humanity_  he’s not used to seeing in them except in the rare moments that Klaus pays attention to them.  Ben steps forward.  They shuffle back.

A vague part of Ben’s mind titters wildly—he’s scaring ghosts now.  Wouldn’t Daddy Dearest be proud of his pet monster?

“Get lost,” he snaps.

Wonder of fucking wonders—they go.  Some of them fade away.  A few, so obviously terrified of the sleek tentacles writhing eagerly around Ben, leave more mundanely, through the open door.  Only two linger—a woman with bright green eyes and the same perpetually sad set to her lips that Klaus wears so casually over his smile, and a man in fatigues with blood on his chest.  But they don’t speak, and they don’t approach Klaus, and they stay well back from Ben.

Ben glares at them both, trying to convey how much he is  _not_  fucking around.

The soldier gives him a salute, and then they fade too.

“B’n?” Klaus mumbles from behind him, in the raspy voice of someone who was mostly comatose not too long ago.  Klaus has always recovered freakishly fast, once he manages to get past the worst of a brush with death, this is a known fact.  It’s like Death doesn’t want him.  Ben still twitches in surprise at the sound, and dismisses Them before he turns around.

“Klaus, you’re awake.”

“Mmm,” Klaus says, cracking an eye open to peer at Ben.  The other eye opens.  “Heard s’methin’.”

“There’s no one here,” Ben says, and stuffs both hands into his pockets.  “Just me.”


End file.
